identifying national with personal interests. For those who believe
there is a divine seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they may
hope will promote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in the
past, in favorable airs, has made beauty or grandeur or spirituality
the characteristics of ancient civilizations in Greece, in Egypt, and in
India. No one can work for his race without the hope that the highest,
or more than the highest, humanity has reached will be within reach of
his race also. We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the
rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the lofty
edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious. And in
Ireland, for all its melancholy history, we may, knowing that we are
human, dream that there is the seed of a Pericles in Patrick's loins,
and that we might carve an Attica out of Ireland.

V.

In Ireland we must of necessity give special thought to the needs of the
countryman, because our main industry is agriculture. We have few big
cities. Our great cities are almost all outside our own borders. They
are across the Atlantic. The surplus population of the countryside
do not go to our own towns but emigrate. The exodus does not enrich
Limerick or Galway, but New York. The absorption of life in great
cities is really the danger which most threatens the modern State with a
decadence of its humanity. In the United States, even in Canada, hardly
has the pioneer made a home in the wilderness when his sons and his
daughters are allured by the distant gleam of cities beyond the plains.
In England the countryside has almost ceased to be the mother of men--at
least a fruitful mother. We are face to face in Ireland with this
problem, with no crowded and towering cities to disguise the emptiness
of the fields. It is not a problem which lends itself to legislative
solution. Whether there be fair rents or no rents at all, the child
of the peasant, yearning for a fuller life, goes where life is at
its fullest. We all desire life, and that we might have it more
abundantly,--the peasant as much as the mystic thirsting for infinite
being,--and in rural Ireland the needs of life have been neglected.

The chief problem of Ireland--the problem which every nation in greater
or lesser measure will have to solve--is how to enable the country-man,
without journeying, to satisfy to the full his economic, social,
intellectual, and spiri